There’s some pretty impressive footage coming out of the incident.
However this purports to show the impact site where it crashed into a frozen lake.
Am I the only person who finds it odd and not a little creepy that the impact crater appears (from the angle shown at least) to be almost perfectly circular? :eek:
Time to go back and reread the opening chapter of Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama again. He nailed it. As he did so often.
Impact craters are always circular. Do you think that every single object that struck the moon did so perpendicularly?
Hmmmm…I imagined that it would have left a more oval shape if it came in at an angle, oh well I guess I can leave the bunker…
I’m going home and shoot BBs into the sandbox…
When I looked at the videos, one thing that seemed odd was how slow the meteor seemed to go in comparison to shooting stars I’ve seen, which usually zip across the sky in a fraction of a second and are gone. Those videos may be slowed down somewhat, but judging by the ones taken from moving vehicles, not that much.
I am left wondering what would have happened if this meteor hit over North Korea? Would the paranoid regime there say it was a nuke and use it as an excuse to attack someone? Or, have they used up their current supply of nuke in last week’s test?
Only if it comes in at such a shallow angle that it actually skims the surface a little, which almost never happens. Phil just mentioned this live, actually–he pointed out that the objects dump a lot of their lateral motion in the atmosphere, leaving them falling more or less straight down.
Most shooting stars are micrometeorites that burn up high in the atmosphere in a second or two. This sucker was large enough to make it through the atmosphere relatively intact and make a crater in addition to scattering debris. By the time it reached the denser lower atmosphere, it would have been slowed considerably, and a large part of its energy bled off into that tremendous sonic boom.
Meteor, meteorite … what’s the dif?
A meteor is the thing you see as a bright light.
A meteorite is the thing that has hit the Earth, the remains of the meteor after it hits.
Thanks. The first I heard of it today was when someone at work said a COMET had hit the ground. :dubious:
Which reminds me: wasn’t this thing supposed to shrink down to the size of a chihuahua’s head?
Thanks, you really do learn something new every day!
Correct. I misspoke above when I said micrometeorites burn up in the upper atmosphere, though a lot of them do reach the surface of the Earth in the form of dust or even tiny pebbles.
Yep, and a meteoroid is what it’s called before it enters the atmosphere (correct? or am I remembering wrong?)
FIL v.1.0, a geologist, never mentioned meteoroids. 
Yep, Meteoroids. Once they hit the atmosphere and begin burning up they become meteors.
The headline on CNN says: “Meteor injures hundreds, spurs call for vigilance,” but I initially read it as “…call for vengeance.”
“Vigilance”? Doing what?
Watching the sky, with the nearest observatory on speed dial?